Beauford Delaney

Beauford Delaney was an African American modernist painter whose vivid portraits, street scenes, interiors, and later abstractions joined expressive color with heavily textured paint. After studying in Boston, he established himself in New York amid Harlem Renaissance and Greenwich Village circles, forming important friendships with James Baldwin and Henry Miller. He moved to Paris in 1953, where his work increasingly explored abstraction, light, and luminous color until his death in 1979.